Monday, May 20, 2013

Sorry about the lack of posts about observing.

I've been very busy with two parents who are I'll for the past month. Caring for two people is can be a little stressful and keeps a person pretty busy.

Because of this much of the activity at HJRO has been by others and I have not been involved much with the astronomy club lately.

We have another person who can open up the observatory, but the current key keepers have much less time to open up the observatory due to their other commitments/jobs which keep them busy.

I was at about 90 percent of the openings of HJRO in the past couple of years. It may be a while before I can be more active with the observatory and many astronomy sessions due to the family health needs I'm dealing with.

I've quickly met a couple of other members or briefly observed at home in the past month. Haven't had much time to observe.

I hope that the session to observe the conjunction of planets in Alen park goes well around memorial day weekend, if that happens. I'm not sure I'll be able to be there as a brief visitor, much less take part in setting up many of my telescope options.

In any event the telescopes I have that would show the three planets together are small grab and go telescopes, so I might be able to show up and briefly setup and do some observing or let other Faac members use my telescopes to observe that event. We will have to see what happens.

As far as HJRO and the school system, I'm a bit disappointed that I can't offer my time to help the kids see some solar observing. My time is really limited right now and HJRO observatory is being reconfigured with more equipment. That reconfiguration could interfere with the ability to show the sky and do solar for the kids, but hopefully that will quickly happen.

HJRO will be getting a new telescope ring setup, which will allow the telescope to be mounted to the telescope mount with a much better and rigid setup. The rings are being donated by George Korody, who is one of the main faac members responsible for the setting up and rebirth of the hjr observatory at Lincoln Park.

In any event I may write more, but find it really difficult to announce and plan any observing events. I'm literally working or up about 18 hours per day with maybe four or five hours sleep at night lately. Needless to say this affects and wears me out as well and makes any spare time in the day a candidate for a cat nap rather than a time to plan to observe. And since demands are random and unplanned, it's almost impossible to block off any time and commit to observe or have the observatory open.

Right now the moon is out and I may head out and do a quick observe of it from my yard before heading to bed or perhaps helping others here get to bed.

There are far more important things happening right now than astronomy for me so I'm just going to have to sit on the sidelines forma while.

Greg
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Monday, May 13, 2013

I went out to HJRO late tonight to take a quick look at Saturn and took a movie of it and processed it, at about 2AM


I've been very busy at home lately and unable to plan and set aside a long block of time for visitors.  I watched the Red Wings today for a couple of periods.  Also decided to make a quick late night trip to the observatory and try to get a better photo of Saturn.  Saturn looked really sharp but not as good as it did the other night.  There was actually quite a bit of moderately average seeing conditions.  Not horrible, but not good.  This movie taken can be processed to not show the seeing issues.  This gives a pretty good representation of what I could see in the eyepiece.  But my view was less powerful and the Cassini division was pretty dark and didn't stand out with a kind of shadow effect that we see here.  I could see some gradient banding detail visually, but my contrast wasn't as good as we see here in the processed image.   Also I could see the ring and some color differences in different parts of the ring for a while.  This using a 15mm eyepiece on the C14 in it's native 3911mm configuration.  I sent out a message to a few FAAC members who might be up and wondering if anything was happening.

Image of Saturn:  Photo was created using Registax 6 from a 1000 frame movie.  Best 100 frames selected.

I probably over processed this a bit with a little bit to much wavelet settings.  I used Linked wavelets on the first four out of six layers.  Turning off the last layer in Registax 6.   Saturn did look wonderful.  This movie was taken at 3911mm with the T1i and 5x digital zoom using BACKYARD EOS.   The shot was taken at 1600 iso, I don't have the exposure setting handy, but I can look it up if someone is interested.


Wednesday, May 1, 2013

I took a photo of some nice sunspots but blogpress on the iPad is acting up

There are some nice sunspots on the sun.

I'll edit this and post the quick photo I took later on the computer.


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Some Faac astronomers will be at HJRO at 8pm or so tonight

The plan is to open up around 8pm.

Will post more later.

Greg


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